Gallery: Guitar Hero World Tour

Analyst: World Tour demand still high, supplies still down originally appeared on Nintendo Wii Fanboy on Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Ads by Google

Picture Sony and Microsoft as two dance teams in the seminal classic You Got Served. Well, MSoft, sporting blinging shoes and white and green hoodies, just did the most awesome break dancing thing ever and called it the “3:1 Black Friday Sales” and the crowd is going crazy and jumping around. Now the head dancer from the MSoft clan, Don Mattrick, senior VP of the Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft, is walking up to the Sony guys, looking at them really seriously in the eye and going, “You got served.”

He then walks away, but pauses for a second, turns, and adds, “We entered into the Black Friday sales period with cautious optimism, knowing that dollar for dollar, Xbox 360 offers more social entertainment value than any other console on the market. Record Black Friday sales in the U.S., coupled with our existing global install base of 25 million and an online community of more than 14 million Xbox LIVE members, have laid the groundwork for continued global sales momentum in 2009.”

That quote is kind of where my You Got Served metaphor falls flat, but Microsoft is actually claiming that the 360 outsold the PS3 by 3:1 and that 360 sales this Black Friday increased by 25 percent. Even Microsoft is admitting that the increased sales are most likely due to that hefty price cut that they implemented. No word on the Wii’s sales in the press release from MSoft, but if I had to guess I’d think that the film for that one might be called You Got Served 2: Wii Just Got Crunk On Everyone’s Ass. God, I’m white.

It's no secret that I'm a sucker for a game with a good title. Or, if I can't have a good title, give me a really weird one to grab my attention. Just string together a set of words with (at best) tenuous links between them and my ears will immediately perk up. Like, "Zany Monkey Fart Coliseum," or "Autoerotic Asphyxiation Racers." 

Damn. I should get a job titling games.

At any rate, this is Crazy Hot Dogs Tailgate Party, a cell phone game arriving on Verizon phones this week. Its a puzzle game where you cook hot dogs at tailgate parties in a puzzle-game interface. There is, apparently, some kind of story mode, which boggles the mind. But how could you possibly go wrong with that name and a feature such as the, "delicious look and sound of cooking hotdogs on the grill?"

Crazy Hot Dogs Tailgate Party is available on Verizon phones now and will be arriving for a wide range of other platforms in the near future. Hit the jump for a press release.

* All-New Roster: 20 new crazy boxers
* Wii controllers for intuitive gameplay
* Dodge, weave and punch opponents
* Fictional characters, Over-the-top action, celebrity caricatures
* Better, stronger, funnier!

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about the Ready 2 Rumble series heading to Wii. A long time ago, we heard a rumor. This time, an Amazon listing all but confirms that the game is in the works. There’s also an old Wiki page for a Ready 2 Rumble on Wii. Can a new Ready 2 Rumble succeed where FaceBreaker failed?

Link

So I was minding my own business at the gym, jamming out to some crazy techno music on my headphones while doing some bench press reps, mindlessly watching the flat screen TV’s hovering above me. A headline peaked my curiosity as I watched the muted (it’s much better this way) morning show. Yahoo’s Top 10 Searches of 2008. Alright, these are always interesting and mildly amusing to see. So they start revealing the list, we got the usual suspects like Angelina Jolie and Lindsay Lohan, but then they got to number 5 on the list — RuneScape. Yes, RuneScape.

I guess there is something to be said about it being the only game on this list, the only game searched for more than Jessica Alba, American Idol, Angelina Jolie, Naruto and Lindsay Lohan. Truthfully, it hurts my brain to think about it. I’m not sure if this is proof that RuneScape is to be respected as a force in the MMO genre, or if it’s simply a testament of Yahoo’s users base. I’m not trying to put down RuneScape, I think it has its place in the world. However, it does strike me as being slightly odd that it is searched for this much. Lets be honest, RuneScape isn’t exactly ground breaking on any front, nor is it even notable in any single aspect of the MMO genre. Maybe the hardcore gamer inside of me doesn’t understand how a game like this could be searched for more than say, Halo, Guitar Hero or World of Warcraft. Perhaps this is that magical casual market that sells millions of games to non-hardcore gamers. That demographic that the Wii seems to have enticed. Maybe, I’m more in the minority than I think I am. Whatever the reason, lets raise our glasses and toast. To RuneScape, for being hotter than Jessica Alba, and being the only game to make it to the top 10. Congrats!

Johns gave her the basics of how he’s approaching the game:

“Lots of gamers create their own characters. Everyone knows Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, but this game gets you more entrenched in the universe. You meet the Metal Men, or Doom Patrol, and everyone gets a chance to embody something different. I like the idea that your secret identity is really outside the computer. You’re a normal guy, and then when you log on to the game, you become the superhero.”

Good enough. But that was the easy part. How about a weirder question?

I asked Jennifer to ask Geoff if he was tempted to script the idea of DC’s parallel earths into “DCUO,” given that DC’s parallel Earths concept is very similar to the idea of server-based sharding in MMOs. Undeterred by the geekery of such a question, Jennifer asked.

Said Johns:”Each player represents a parallel Earth in a way. I like that idea, when you’re entering it for the first time. There are some major storylines that you can play out and live.”

And how about an update about the game’s release and his progress in the assignment?

“It launches I think in early 2010, it could be late 2009. I’ve written the overall story and the path that gets you into the game and the areas of the universe and how to explore them, but not every line of dialogue. That’s a fulltime job, it’s too frigging big, too intense to write every line of an MMO. I’d probably jump off a building.”

Check out more from Jennifer’s interview, covering “Smallville” and the Legion of Super-Heroes over at MTV’s Splash Page comics-crazy blog.

Related Posts:
Sony Online: ‘DC Universe’ To Be Female-Friendly, ‘EverQuest’ Returning, Console MMOs On The Rise, More
Sony Online: Patching Concerns May Prevent PS3-PC Compatibilty For ‘DC Universe Online’

It actually reminds me of some studies that Daphne Bavelier and her colleagues, performed at the University of Rochester. They actually trained people to play video games. And what they showed was that after people were trained to play games, their attentional abilities on a wide variety of standard laboratory tasks, including tasks that required some switching between different mental sets or tasks, improved. Video games, I think when you talk about young people today are very popular. And it turned out that some of those results were very specific to particular video games and particular, the ones that are first person shoot them up “Doom” type games. But still, I think that these sorts of experiences may have a training effect that people can learn to become good multi-taskers, if they engage in activities that lend themselves to multitasking.

Just the other day, I was thinking of how crazy it is when playing an FPS game. There are so many things to keep track of, yet I manage to suffer through it. I never stopped to think about the real world implications though…

Link